Museums.

Pilsen Mirrors The Art In `The Other Mexico' Exhibit

August 13, 1993|By Jay Pridmore.

There is no mystery about why curators organized the current exhibition at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. "The Other Mexico: Sources and Meanings" focuses on people who are too often neglected. They are Mexican artists living not in Mexico but north of the border in the United States.

Many of the works in the show, however, are dramatic and even leering. Most of the 20 artists in the exhibition-from Texas, California, Chicago and elsewhere-are influenced not simply by the traditions of the old country but the modern pressures of life in this one as well. That combination can be evocative but also jarring.

"The Other Mexico" includes a broad range of contemporary work. Some blend pre-Columbian images with modern ones. Other works are typified by an expressionistic scene of a drive-by shooting in L.A.

In Chicago, the first stop for the exhibition as it travels across the country, visitors can also glimpse "the other Mexico" that is closer to home-the Pilsen neighborhood right outside the museum.

Pilsen is one of Chicago's most intriguing enclaves. Once a place for Bohemians and other European immigrants, it now serves as "point of entry" for thousands of Mexican immigrants, some of whom seek their fortunes here, others of whom move on to other neighborhoods and suburbs. Because of its deep ethnic history it is an exotic and colorful community. It also has its share of desperation.

It is just such a blend that Pilsen artist Marcos Raya captures in one of the more curious works in "The Other Mexico." It is entitled "Night Nurse," Raya says, and was partly inspired by the tortured life of Frida Kahlo, the famous Mexican surrealist who died in 1954. It is also about Raya's own ordeals in Pilsen before his recent success as an artist.

"Night Nurse" is a mixed-media installation. Its centerpiece is a painting of the artist himself, unconscious on a hospital bed. A kindly doctor looks weary but reassuring. To the side is a shapely manikin wrapped in bandages, and nearby are cases with all-too-real medical objects like syringes and bottles.

The relationship between a surrealistic hospital and "the other Mexico" might be obscure. But Raya, who is 45, says the work symbolizes his often aimless past in Pilsen. At different points in the '70s, alcohol and stabbings came close to killing him. The hospital was a kind of refuge.

Raya is sober and healthy now, and he's popular on the streets where he used to sleep on his worst nights. But he is convinced that there is meaning in his bad old days, that they reveal the "subterranean culture" of the barrio around Pilsen. In his art he sometimes depicts his "dog years," as he calls them, with humor or irony.

But humor is absent from "Night Nurse." Instead it is like an exposed nerve. The installation also includes a night scene of 18th Street and Blue Island Avenue, the geographical center of Pilsen. The only lights are from bars. "When people are poor, they are hungry, but they can always find something to drink," Raya said.

The artist has traveled a long way since his "dog years." He came to Chicago as a teenager when he arrived from Guanajuato, Mexico, to live with his mother. "I was scared. I wanted to leave," he said.

But he stayed and got involved in art at Crane High School. Eventually he participated in an academic program for minority kids in the East, and then he decided to go to Mexico City.

For two years there, Raya was more involved in radical politics than fine art. But the experience energized him, so when he returned to Chicago he reestablished himself in art. Much of his work was done at Casa Aztlan, the first Hispanic settlement house in the neighborhood. Among other murals, he painted the walls of Casa Aztlan's meeting room with scenes of united workers, Emiliano Zapata, and other symbols of the class struggle.

It was during this time that he fell in love with the vibrant Mexican way of life in Pilsen.

But demons were all around.

In the middle '70s Casa Aztlan lost its funding for art. Raya kept on teaching without pay. But pressures eventually took its toll on his first marriage. They also led to countless stays in the hospital.

Little by little, Raya found his way back.

In 1987, he got a commission from the Blue Rider Theater, in the artists colony in East Pilsen, to paint a backdrop for the play "Frida: The Last Portrait," about Frida Kahlo. So began his interest in the anguish of this artist who was the wife of the great muralist Diego Rivera, and whose art and life are presently the subject of much interest independent of her husband.

Today, Marcos Raya is a busy and respected artist with works in several shows of Mexican-American art traveling around the country. He credits the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum for encouraging his career and providing a major spotlight for his output.

Raya is still intrigued by his old neighborhood, where he has a large second-floor studio on Blue Island Avenue.